Born in 1911 in Lithuania, at that time a Grand Duchy incorporated into Russia, Czesław Miłosz began life as a subject of the Tsar. Minor nobility, the family was Catholic in faith, Polish in nationality. Szetejnie, their manor in Lithuania, was built in the eighteenth century and expanded later. The adult Czesław claimed to have been bored by unvaried neighbors whose conversation was restricted to coats of arms, estates, and family trees, but a number of his poems have a lingering nostalgia for Szetejnie and the forests and river of its...

 
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